Desert Queen (59 page)

I
n Syria, after nearly two years of Faisal’s pleas to the French, and of France’s refusal to recognize the Arab Government, events were coming to a head. On July 14, 1920, with an expanded French army advancing from Beirut to Damascus, General Henri Gouraud sent Faisal an ultimatum, demanding acceptance of the French mandate and French control over the Arab army, the economy and the railroads. Faisal ordered his troops to disband, and although some refused and fought a desperate battle, the end was in sight.

On July 20, 1920, the Emir Faisal and his brother Zaid quietly left Damascus. The Arab Government had lasted twenty-one months. Gertrude believed that Faisal, angry and feeling betrayed by the British, who had not kept their promises to the Sharifians, would soon gather his army and try to return. Whatever happened, the emotions would spread across the desert. If the French were forced out of Syria, the British might have to leave Iraq. “Well,” she informed her father, “if the British evacuate Mesopotamia I shall stay peacefully here and see what happens. It will be very nice … like old times!”

Like old times for Gertrude. But not for Hugh. The fortune that the Bell family had taken for granted was suddenly beginning to disappear. Within a decade the wealth from iron would turn to dust. The Bells’ business had suffered terribly from the strikes and the Depression that hit England after the war. Hugh and his partner were now trying to borrow money to refinance their company. A letter had arrived from him asking Gertrude for power of attorney to sign her name on bank loans.

“I’ll go a dash with you,” she responded cheerfully, echoing King Lear. “Then when we’re both in the workhouse we’ll write our life and times.” She understood that by signing the papers she would ultimately owe the bank seventy-two hundred pounds, which she hoped she would earn as the Dorman Long stock increased its dividends. Meantime, she would watch her expenses carefully, she promised. Her salary was not enough to live on, and entertaining at home was a necessary part of her job, but she could reduce her extra allowance from England to thirty pounds a month.

Whatever happened, she had no intention of leaving Baghdad. At the worst, she suggested, the British would withdraw from Mesopotamia, land values would drop and she would finally be able to buy her house. There was a silver lining after all, she told herself.

Yet she felt a pang of remorse for not being with Hugh at this troubling time. “Darling Father,” she continued, “I do hope you enjoy my letters as much as I enjoy writing them! If they seem to you rather mad, I can only offer as excuse that I’m living in a perfectly mad world. Added to which the heat makes one a little light-headed. One just accepts what happens, from day to day, without any amazement.”

In spite of such confidence, Gertrude was stunned when, on August 6, 1920, a telegram arrived from Edwin Montagu. It was not, as she might have hoped, a message of congratulations on her fifty-second birthday, but an official reprimand, a response to a complaint from Wilson. “Private and Personal,” Montagu wrote:

I hope you will understand from me that in the present critical state of affairs of Mesopotamia when the future of the country hangs in the balance we should all pull together. If you have views which you wish us to consider, I should be glad if you would either ask the Civil Commissioner to communicate them or apply for leave and come home and represent them. You may always be sure of consideration of your views but Political Officers should be very careful of their private correspondence with those not at present in control of affairs. Apart from all questions of usual practice and convention it may increase rather than diminish difficulties a result which I know you would deplore.

Gertrude immediately drafted a reply:

I am also wholly in agreement with policy which has been pursued since April. You are sufficiently aware of my general attitude towards the Arab question to know that I regret it was not embarked on earlier. To express this view in public would now however be valueless and even harmful. With regard to correspondence except for private letters to my Father I cannot recall letters on political subjects to unofficial persons which have not been previously submitted to Colonel Wilson. Your remarks are however a useful warning.

S
he sent her response, along with Montagu’s telegram, to A.T., asking if he had anything to add. In an interoffice note, he scrawled:

Miss Bell. When Sir Percy Cox passed through he asked—a propos of events earlier in the year—whether my relations with you were happier. I said that I could not say they were—that your divergence of opinion was marked and a matter of public knowledge and indeed of comment. (Sayid Talib mentioned this to me rather pointedly today.) I said the position would be untenable but for the fact that I was hoping before long to be relieved. You have always maintained your right as an individual to write what you like—to whom you like—you have, I gratefully admit, shown me letters e.g. to Asquith, but I do not like their being written and the fact that I am cognisant of them must not be held to include approval. Otherwise I have no comment to make.

The following day Wilson requested a meeting. She glowered at his rough demeanor, her reedlike figure in sharp contrast to his iron hulk. “It had been quite inevitable that people should have known that our opinions diverged because I had always said so—to you first and foremost,” she told him. “But in that respect I hadn’t differed in any degree from the declarations of H.M.G.” The particular instance he had mentioned from Sayid Talib, that scurrilous rogue, was “manifestly absurd,” she snapped. If she was being “made a peg on which to hang opposition,” it would be much better if he would send her on leave to India until Sir Percy returned. Indeed, a holiday in India might allow her some rest.

But Wilson refused to grant her leave. He himself was going home soon, he answered, and besides, he conceded, knowing that she was the key to good relations with the Arabs, he thought she might be of use to his successor. She listened and smiled to herself.

They discussed the matter of her correspondence with friends. His note had left her “in amazement,” she said. She reminded him that they had talked about the letter she wrote to Mr. Asquith last week; it was “scarcely fair” for Wilson to complain now. After all, he had said nothing, not even that he preferred it not be sent. But it wasn’t only the letter to Asquith that made Wilson anxious, she discovered. Had she written to Domnul Chirol and to the India Office? he now wanted to know.

Domnul was one of her closest friends, she reminded him; her letters to him were personal. And when she wrote to Sir Arthur Hirtzel, she had done so, “almost invariably,” with Wilson’s knowledge and sometimes with his hearty approval; she had even written once in Wilson’s defense, she made him recall, and he had been grateful to her for the letter. Furthermore, she injected, “Edwin’s warning specially mentioned non-official persons.”

Wilson answered that he “objected to any private communications with the India Office.”

That was “quite preposterous,” Gertrude growled; nevertheless, she would certainly comply with his wishes.

Thanking her for her “frankness,” Wilson shook her hand. They parted as amicably as two firebrands could: Gertrude, pleased that he soon would be leaving; Wilson, pleased that she soon would be out of his life.

It was true, she confessed to her father, that she was not entirely in the right. She admitted that Wilson’s “insolent rudeness” sometimes threw her into a rage. And that might have shown itself to the Arabs. But she did not intentionally want them to present a divided front; that could do the British nothing but harm. They needed a show of strength, especially since their troubles in Mesopotamia were hardly at an end.

T
he news that began the week of August 16 made her heart sink. Gertrude’s most trusted Agaili informer came to the office to tell her that Colonel Leachman, the Political Officer in Dulaim, had gotten into a bitter feud with Sheikh Dhari of the Shammar tribe. The Agaili had heard a few days ago that Leachman had viciously berated the sheikh for not maintaining peace along the road to Mosul. Afterward, he ordered some of the Shammar to repair a drain in the path. Sheikh Dhari, known to be vindictive, nevertheless ordered his men to cooperate. But as the Political Officer turned around to leave, he was ambushed; one of the tribesmen, the son of the sheikh, shot Leachman in the back. “He always used extremely unmeasured language to the Arabs and Shaikh Dhari had many grudges against him,” Gertrude explained in a letter home. “He was a wild soldier of fortune but a very gallant officer and his name was known all over Arabia.” Now, she moaned, “Lord knows what’s going to happen here.”

In Baghdad, where a curfew had been installed, an uneasy calm had descended. But in the rest of the country the three-month uprising was still raging. Thousands of tribesmen were out looting; the entire political staff at Shahraban had been savagely murdered. The flames roared around Gertrude, fueled not only by the infernal rebellion but by Wilson’s fiery rage. When another message arrived from Montagu, upbraiding her for her correspondence with London, she responded sharply: “To allay anxiety I now confine myself to writing to my Father and shopkeepers.”

Wilson’s temper, the nasty cables from home, the brutality of the tribes and the hot, miserable weather left her depressed. On August 23 she wrote despondently to Florence: “We have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anyone suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed. I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern—and failed.”

She felt numb, “half dead,” from the turmoil. “I feel as if I were living from day to day without trying to make any plans for the future.” Yet a glimmer of hope remained. “At the bottom of my heart I think it possible that the situation may clear as unexpectedly as it has developed, though it’s equally possible that it mayn’t. Oh dear! I wish the world were a little more normal. Or do you think war and revolution may now be reckoned as normal?”

Through it all, she worked on the second half of her comprehensive report on the civil administration. Nearly completed now, it was, she told her father, the most difficult task she had ever undertaken. “One can’t write history while it’s all in the making and hasn’t arrived at any conclusion.” Nevertheless, she added, “to my stupefaction A.T. thinks it a masterpiece.”

S
ayid Talib brought her a pleasant surprise. A skillful politican, he had helped the British immensely by quieting the insurrection in Baghdad. Now he was working hard to organize a moderate political party and sought British support. Lobbying anyone he could, he crudely told her friend Mr. Tod, a businessman: “What’s needed in this administration is experience. I’ve got it. A doctor before he learns his trade will kill at least two hundred people. I’ve killed my two hundred—no one knows it better than yourself.” Added Gertrude, in a note to her father, “And Mr. Tod couldn’t honestly say he hadn’t.”